Microsoft Azure Cloud Services Continues To Gain On Amazon And Google

If you are following the cloud computing industry for the past few years, the title should not have surprised you. Microsoft Azure continues its momentum of gaining customers more than Amazon and Google. A survey of CIOs by the research firm Pacific Crest Securities has found enterprise customers are going to spend more money on Microsoft’s Azure and Office 365 than Google and Amazon Web Services. Also, Microsoft was the second most preferred supplier for public and private cloud services behind VMware.

For the survey, Pacific Crest checked in with CIOs at 152 companies with 1,000 or more employees — most of them with over 5,000 employees. That at least partially explains the overall strength for Microsoft: Big as it is, Amazon’s AWS tends to be more popular with earlier-stage (and therefore smaller) companies.

One thing that large enterprises tend to like, writes Pacific Crest’s Brendan Barnicle, is that Microsoft’s cloud tends to work nicely with their existing Active Director infrastructure, the system they use to sign into older Microsoft products like Exchange. They also like it because they get access to a lot of Microsoft products that they couldn’t get from a standard installation of Microsoft Office.